Highlights from TikTok’s official marketing guide

Platform darling of the lip-syncing youth, TikTok, is attempting to make its marketing capabilities accessible through a new guide.

Over the course of just a few years, TikTok has muscled its way into social media’s top flight with user growth pushing its global user base close to a billion – with consumption growth blowing other platforms out of the water.

But with such a fast-moving (literally) platform, brands are struggling to heed the company’s advice of: “don’t make ads, make TikToks”. Now, there’s a guide to help you do it.

Some highlights

• Entertainment value matters, especially for brands. Ultimately, brands are showing up among playful, irreverent and funny videos that lie at TikTok’s core so while branded videos ought to be fun, for businesses large and small value matters more than virality.
• Tools like Ads Manager let brands create and run biddable ad campaigns. Brands like Omolola Jewellery used the combination of performance ads on TikTok and an e-commerce presence on Shopify to overcome the closure of their main stockists over the festive period in the UK. The two platforms, TikTok and Shopify are integrated so that you can manage TikTok ads and orders through the Shopify dashboard.
• Creator marketplace is a key avenue for finding and managing creators (FKA influencers) on the platform. These are certified by TikTok and operate across 20 different markets. In addition, the platform includes a performance manager.

Some stats

• It’s not just Gen-Z – 67% of TikTokers are over 25
• TikTok plays a role in purchase decisions for up to 83% of its users.
• 42% of users say they’re on the platform to discover new things.
• 56% said content on TikTok helped them to decide what to buy.

The long view

“Brands are beginning to use TikTok to engage users through native video content, particularly in the form of participatory ‘hashtag challenge’ campaigns. However, numerous controversies have called into question the safety of the environment, both for brands and users” – WARC’s What we know about marketing on TikTok

Sourced from TikTok, WARC